Which may make Richard Cohen the stupidest motherf$#%er on the face of the earth, beating out Douglas Feith.

You see, he wants to wring his hands, and say that there should be no prosecutions for torture, because it might work, once.

This ignores the fact that it does not work most of the time, in fact it makes things much worse, because not only does it make potential allies into opponents, but it does not extract reliable information.

Notwithstanding Mr. Cohen’s self-professed, “abhorrence of torture,” this is really about the fact that inside the Washington, DC Beltway, the idea for accountability for crimes is an anathema to the “very serious people.”

He coaches this moral capitulation as his desire for the impossible, “absolute security,” which does not exist sitting in one’s home, or driving on a street, but this is thrown in because it sounds reasonable, and justifies the most heinous of acts.

The reality is that they are completely bereft of morality, and so attached to Sally Quinn’s damn cocktail parties and their access to the politically powerful in the nation, that they endorse criminality and moral indecency on a scale that boggles the mind.

That being said, cheer-leading crimes against humanity and endorsing the idea that there should never be any accountability does not make Richard Cohen a stupid man, it just makes him a war criminal, guilty of crimes against humanity like Julius Streicher or Hassan Ngeze, what makes him the stupidest man in the world is this:

Attorney General Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to see whether any of the CIA’s interrogators broke the law. Special prosecutors are often themselves like interrogators — they don’t know when to stop. They go on and on because, well, they can go on and on. One of them managed to put Judith Miller of The New York Times in jail — a wee bit of torture right there. No CIA interrogator can feel safe. The interrogators are about to be interrogated.

(emphasis mine)

While Judith “EC” Miller’s incarceration on contempt of court charges is undoubtedly coercive, and openly so, the intent of the contempt citation and jailing was to extract information about her sources, it was by no means torture.

Anyone conflating incarceration with torture is really, really, mind bogglingly stupid.

Te stoopid….It burns us!!1